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Home / Compensation / Hudson River Trading / Software Engineer
Total compensation for a Hudson River Trading Software Engineer ranges from about $375K at the entry level to $3.5M+ at the most senior bands, with a typical mid-level package around $1.1M. Below is the full breakdown by level - base salary, annual equity, and bonus - from public-source data.
Public-source estimates (Beta). Last updated 2026-06. Figures are annualized USD.
| Level | Years | Base (p50) | Equity/yr (p50) | Bonus (p50) | Total (p25-p90) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New GradCore Developer (New Grad) | 0-2 YOE | $225K | $2K | $250K | $375K - $760K |
| MidCore Developer | 2-5 YOE | $265K | $5K | $450K | $540K - $1.3M |
| SeniorSenior Core Developer | 5-9 YOE | $310K | $5K | $775K | $780K - $2.2M |
| LeadLead Core Developer (Staff-equivalent) | 8+ YOE | $350K | $10K | $1.3M | $1.1M - $3.5M |
Among the highest new-grad offers anywhere, rivaling Jane Street. HRT calls generalist engineers 'Core Developers' - the bar is systems-level C++ and the interview leans hard on OS, networking, and performance.
Mid-level. Bonus is a percentage-of-pool model tied to firm performance; strong firm years move everyone's number materially.
Senior IC. HRT is flat - no formal levels - so 'senior' here is tenure- and impact-inferred. Engineers on the live trading path out-earn research-tooling peers.
Staff-equivalent. Effectively profit-pool participation. External hires at this tenure are rare and individually negotiated.
7 rounds. 6 of them can be practised here - each one below links the rep that trains it.
Recruiter screen
30 minutes. Background, level calibration, role alignment - HRT splits roles roughly between Algo Developer (closer to research, works on strategies and quant infrastructure) and Core Developer (closer to systems engineering, works on trading platform and low-latency infrastructure). Recruiters help calibrate which side fits your background.
Technical phone screen 1
45-60 minutes. One coding problem at Medium-to-Hard difficulty in your language of choice - C++ and Python most common. Often includes a probability or expected-value puzzle as a warmup or follow-up. Cleanliness and explicit reasoning matter as much as the algorithm.
Free rep: Coding challenges with a real sandbox →Technical phone screen 2
45-60 minutes. Often more applied - a problem with statistical or data-manipulation flavor, or a deeper coding round in C++ for Core Developer candidates. May include a probability puzzle round of its own.
Free rep: Coding challenges with a real sandbox →Onsite: coding deep dive
60-90 minutes. Hard coding problem, often building a small system end-to-end with the interviewer asking follow-up questions about design choices, edge cases, performance, and how you'd extend the code. For Core Developer candidates, deep modern C++ knowledge expected (move semantics, RAII, allocator design, concurrency primitives, cache behavior).
Free rep: Coding challenges with a real sandbox →Onsite: probability and quantitative reasoning
60-90 minutes. Probability puzzles, often game-theoretic or multi-step. Common shapes: expected-value problems, Bayesian updating, optimal stopping, game-theoretic reasoning, statistical estimation problems. The interviewer cares more about how explicitly you state assumptions and how you reason than about whether you arrive at the textbook answer quickly.
Free rep: What this round looks for →Onsite: system design (senior+)
60-90 minutes for senior and above. Trading-platform flavored. Common prompts: design a low-latency order management system with deterministic latency budgets, design market data processing across global venues, design research compute infrastructure for backtesting, design real-time risk aggregation. Depth on data layout, latency budgets, and the trading workflow expected.
Free rep: Design walkthrough: Design a Payments / Checkout System (Stripe-style) →Onsite: hiring manager / culture fit
45-60 minutes. Conversational. Background, motivation for HRT specifically (the firm screens for this - candidates who treat HRT as 'just another trading firm' don't fit, especially given HRT's smaller and culturally distinctive engineering org), how you operate in small-team environments, examples of times you reasoned through hard technical or quantitative problems.
Free rep: STAR answers: Dive Deep (Amazon Leadership Principle) →The full Hudson River Trading prep pack → what they value, topic emphasis, and the questions candidates ask.
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